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Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

bbc.com

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Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#241

Post by Macross8299 »

aphextim wrote: post #215
threeseed wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same on Reddit. The sheer toxicity of many of the comments is something I haven't seen for a long time. They really hate that a women is getting credit and that others aren't getting the same level of attention. I wonder how those same people think about Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. They had huge teams behind them as well.

https://files.catbox.moe/tejoch.png

I like how you highlight some admittedly minor commits in big scary red boxes while ignoring technically significant ones like "added function to figure out amt of systematic noise you need to add to get a chi squared of 1",

This is why people say there's sexism in tech bud. A male MIT PhD who was the public face of their project would not be subjected to nearly this much doubt and accusations of being deadweight by insecure 4chan weirdos combing through git logs.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#242

Post by dennisgorelik »

melling wrote: post #17

Katie gave a TED talk: https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs

It is an interesting presentation, but I do NOT understand Katie's explanation about how they were going to minimize the bias [to "see" already predicted black hole visualization] while creatively interpreting inputs from sparsely placed telescopes around the earth.

Do you understand Katie's explanation?

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#243

Post by andrelaszlo »

morrbo wrote: post #14

I see a lot of mention on various forums about the storage they used (5pb) but am just wondering if anyone know what kind of backend they used to house this? From what I saw there were too many disks - in the wrong type of enclosure - to be running on a single server, which suggests multiple physical servers. I've seen a prior CERN research paper on gluster and ceph (iirc) and am just wondering if anyone in the know…

The WaPo article also references a few of the interesting issues they had:

"Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted outside a supercomputer facility at MIT."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/10/see-black-...

I'd love to read more about this if anyone has an article with more details.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#244

Post by dvtrn »

CydeWeys wrote: post #237
dvtrn wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But in a published headline, one ought to be addressed by their formal title. Differences exist between casual conversation and publication. A distinction I shouldn’t have to point out as one that exists.

In the headline? They call her "Dr" just a few sentences into the article. The rule of headlines is to use as few words as possible, and every one of them should be necessary. I've never heard that formal titles MUST be used in headlines, and indeed in practice this doesn't seem to be the case. Shaquille O'Neal has a PhD and I've never seen him referenced as Dr. Shaquille O'Neal, in a headline or otherwise (and no, I…

Note that I didn’t say she MUST be referred to as doctor. You did. I said ought, because the accomplishment is worthy of merit as a scientific achievement and in this scenario I think it’s quite proper the doctor is formally addressed as Doctor, it’s highly relevant and germane to the topic in the article.

My statement isn’t an assertion of requirement on the part part of the BBC. This is just opinion and really ought not be looked upon as something incendiary or contentious.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#245

Post by ioulian »

scraft wrote: post #137
dalemyers wrote: post #44

I've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the linked piece is. Sometimes these threads are full of only subtly veiled hatred and leave me with a feeling of disgust. This thread is one of those. There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and th…

I am glad she got credit and I am glad in that respect she got treated equally. I am a little sad that her gender is a 'thing', as in I think I have seen more comments on various news site comments, social media, etc. that are quick to specifically point out she is a woman. I get they are trying to be positive, but it also has this weird reverse side where it is like "An amazing feat in STEM has been achieved, but yo…

Yeah, the most important fact for the humanity that they did it, they created the first image of a black hole, is it a man, a woman, a child, a muslim, a white man, what does it even matter?

I kinda hate the recent trend to focus more on gender or race if somebody achieves anything. Look what Morgan Freeman said about racism [0]. Is it really important that she is a woman? Do people think a lot of women can't achieve these things? And if 1 woman achieved this, all women are better than men? Do everybody just expect men to be smarter and if they do something outstanding it's ok, but when a woman does it, it's extraordinary... Why focus so much on this?

In discussions like this we should really focus on the person (and also the team behind her/him, I doubt she could do it alone without the team), not the gender or race or whatever.

I really hope this positive discrimination hype dies out, it doesn't help anybody. Let the best person for the job get the job.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#246

Post by CydeWeys »

dalemyers wrote: post #44

I've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the linked piece is. Sometimes these threads are full of only subtly veiled hatred and leave me with a feeling of disgust. This thread is one of those. There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and th…

Yeah, this comment section is really bad.

As someone who's been interested in astronomy my entire life, and considered getting a degree in it but only ended up with a minor since I sensibly prioritized CS and wanted to graduate in four years, this is an awesome, amazing, really clever accomplishment. And yet many of the comments here are just so negative, either outright sexist, picking nits and trying to argue that it isn't a big breakthrough or anything, or going through code contributions line-by-line trying to establish that really someone else had more to do with it.

All I know is, she must be insanely intelligent and hard-working. What an awesome PhD project, and at MIT no less!, an institution that I have enormous respect for and that I somewhat identify with because my dad attended and I've been there for many events. I'm jealous. This would've been the exact kind of thing I'd have gone into in astronomy for (because of my background in programming) had I seriously pursued it, but I know I'm just not diligent enough to have seen it through. And being honest, I didn't apply myself well enough in undergrad to have gotten good enough grades to get into a good grad school.

It sucks that so many people jump into "push people down" mode instead of "life people up" mode in these kinds of situations rather, because this is an amazing scientific accomplishment that deserves celebrating. One of the PIs in one of the press conferences said that this was the most important accomplishment in astronomy since 2014 [when Rosetta landed a probe on a comet], and I tend to agree. It's not just about this one image, but about establishing the feasibility of a virtual planet-sized radio telescope that is capable of imaging lots more than just black holes. A lot more discoveries are likely to come out of this technique, and guess who came up with the algorithm to make sense of all those petabytes of data?

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#248

Post by Gpetrium »

Frost1x wrote: post #188
black_puppydog wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends a bit on the scientific field, but in mine (computer vision, which this was also published in) the first author is the "main" author, usually doing most if not all the "ground work", then you have collaborators and co-authors, and finally the supervisors (in the case of the PhD student that she was at the time). It is becoming more common to see papers with "Author1 , Author2 , Author3..." lists, where the…

I've found that CS contributions in academia are often poorly credited (sometimes even entirely neglected) to endeavors not purely executed within CS itself. It's interesting considering how many modern scientific endeavors are dependent on new innovative algorithms, software, and computing techniques in both experimental and theoretical work then its frequently just hand-waved away as "technology." I'm not saying su…

Although I agree with the point you have raised, it can sometimes be a little tricky to draw the line. Should we have Microsoft cited for projects completed using their software or system? Should we always cite Newton when using calculus?

I think society implicitly assumes that there has been a tone of people backing up a single individual towards their main achievements and that the individual is humble enough to know and to try - ever so slightly - to show appreciation.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#249

Post by princeofwands »

dvtrn wrote: post #212

Title ought to reflect the fact that this woman has a doctorate from MIT and should rightfully be addressed as Dr. Katie Bouman.

Gross double standard. Would you write:

> the fact that this man has a doctorate ...

No, you would not.

We are a long way from equality if the fact that she happens to have a vagina becomes a huge talking point. Everyone defines her as a girl or woman, but this is a scientist. Dr. Bouman is enough.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#250

Post by dang »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #148
ilarum wrote: post #6

Relevant repository - https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging

That code definitely wouldn't pass code review by me. Terrible commit messages too.

No doubt. But can you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Especially not ones that violate this site guideline: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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